Why speech synthesis? (in memory of Prof. Jonathan Allen, 1934-2000) [Special issue intro.]

Normally, this transactions has a history of attracting world-class papers in speech processing, mostly in areas such as analysis, enhancement, coding, and recognition, and, to a lesser extent, synthesis. The few published papers that we believe are relevant to speech synthesis are mainly concerned with speech modifications and speech resynthesis from given speech parameter vectors. Linguistic and system issues, synthesizers, "letter-to-sound" (pronunciation) rules, generation (from text) of proper prosody (contours of fundamental frequency, phoneme durations, and amplitudes) to make the synthetic speech pragmatically natural, to name a few, were only sparsely addressed. The editors go about explaining what has changed so that they can justify a Special Issue on Speech Synthesis, and explain what "signal processing" has to do with it. In addition, after summarizing the specila issue contents, it is nooted that this special issue is dedicated to the memory of Prof. Jonathan Allen who died on April 24, 2000. Prof. Allen was Director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, from 1981 until his death. Many knew him as a friend and a leader in speech research, and, most notably and specifically, as a true pioneer in speech synthesis. A brief biography is given highlighting his professional achievements.